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Making A Difference – Thoughts, Observations and Opinions
This is Dave Brock’s Blog.
It offers my views on a variety of business, sales, marketing, and leadership topic. My goal is to make a difference for you, the reader, in both your professional and personal lives.
Latest Posts
On Layoffs…..
I read an important article by Elizabeth Spiers, Layoffs by Email Show What Employers Really Think of Their Workers. Please take the time to read it, it’s more important than this post. In the past year, we’ve seen 100’s of thousands of layoffs, particularly in technology segments. As Ms. Spiers outlines, as tragic as these are, the dehumanizing means by which too many of those people have been notified of their terminations tells us more about the absence of caring and respect senior leaders have of their people. For years, I’ve been writing about the mechanization of selling. Customers have […]
“Two Years Ago, The Biggest Challenges You And Your Organization Faced Were…..”
Imagine receiving a very well crafted prospecting outreach. It is well written. It is specific to issues that companies in your industry face, it is specific to the issues people in your role (in your industry) face. And the email started with: Two years ago, the issues most critical to people like you in [name an industry] were these…… And the letter went on to talk about how the sender could help. If you got that far in reading the outreach. How would you respond? We know the answer to that, the world has changed. Two years ago, we were […]
“Write 1000 Emails In 15 Minutes…” Let’s Stop The Insanity!!
My social feeds seem dominated with “hints and tips” for writing massive numbers of emails in the shortest periods of time. Today, I hit the tipping point, one was leveraging ChatGPT to write these emails. In reading it, the author had, apparently, discovered the concept of “mail merge,” using Google tools. And creating the “killer” email message using Chat, neglecting the fact that Chat can only produce a well articulated, grammatically correct, mediocre message (I’ve written about the problems with these technologies before). But every day, I see some expert presenting us their insights about how to produce 1000s of […]
Start With “Why”
No, I’m not channeling my inner Simon Sinek, but “Why” initiates very powerful diagnostic processes. My feeds are filled with posts on failure. Response rates to any kind of outbound prospecting continues to plummet. Every metric is down—opens, click throughs, phone engagement, meetings, everything is in sharp decline. While, in aggregate, companies may be hitting their revenue targets, per capita seller performance is plummeting. It’s commonplace to see win rates less than 20%. Down significantly from previous years (I remember times when win rates less than 33% put a sales person on a PIP. Pipeline integrity is worsening, pipelines are […]
Productivity, Effectiveness, Efficiency
I don’t know why I’m surprised, but I was—-actually shocked. Yesterday, I opened an email from a very reputable SaaS company. I was interested because the piece was focused on understanding the difference in productivity and efficiency. And virtually everything covered was wrong–dangerously wrong. The same confusion, about these terms fills our social feeds. We don’t understand these terms, and how to leverage them appropriately, we will fail—possibly very efficiently. So let’s start with some definitions: Efficiency: Efficiency is strictly a measure of some sort of quantity accomplished in a period of time or for a certain “investment.” For example, […]
“Think Time….”
Our focus on activity causes us to overlook the importance of idle time—time to think, reflect, plan. We seek to fill every moment of our time with activity. Whether it’s prospecting, managing deals, reporting, time for meetings, etc. We go from activity to activity, rarely pausing to reflect on what has happened. We go to the next activity, not taking the time to think about what we want to accomplish. Much of the WFH argument is based on activity. We don’t have to spend time commuting, so we fill that with more activities. We don’t have the social distractions and […]